10 Ways to Maximize Your Productivity with MS Teams: A Comprehensive Guide

MS Teams Productivity

Third-Party App Integration

One of the most significant things that sets Microsoft Teams apart from other collaboration platforms is support for third-party app integration. This allows users to access and integrate apps like Tasks, Planner, Trello and many others, all from the same app and in a seamless way.

Channels and Tabs

A central feature of Teams is channels, which are used for conversations. These can be public or private and can include a small number of users or thousands of them. Each channel can also have a tab, which can be used to link to files, tools and services that are relevant to the channel's topic.

Chat

Easily message, video or audio call any person directly in Teams. Send GIFs, stickers and emojis for quick, expressive feedback and share photos and videos for moments you want to capture and remember.

Cloud Storage

Get all the files and documents you need in Teams for your team to use on any device. Powered by SharePoint, this new experience lets you find and share files in real time with team members, see rich previews of 320 file extensions, create data views and work with metadata, review on-hover file cards, and more.

MS Teams remote work helps employees communicate and collaborate with their colleagues while maintaining a balance between their personal and professional life.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations worldwide started to shift to remote working. However, some companies were not prepared to face this sudden change. In such situations, MS Teams became the most effective way to support remote working.

Improved Video Meetings

The main benefit of Microsoft Teams for remote work is improved video conferencing capabilities. It enables team members to schedule and launch video meetings with just a few clicks.

Status Messages

It's a good idea to set up status messages on your team's channel so that everyone can know when other team members are online or offline. This helps prevent misunderstandings when people don't know who is available for an important call or discussion.

Approvals

With the Approvals feature in Microsoft Teams, you can create and send approvals to colleagues in a chat or channel conversation. You can also use the Approvals app to track all previous and pending approval requests.

Productivity

One of the challenges of working remotely is keeping up with productivity levels. To overcome this issue, implement an organized workflow that your remote workers follow. This will make them more efficient and productive while also ensuring that they stay on course with their goals.

Organizing Events

In addition to regular meetings, it's helpful for remote teams to hold fun and engaging activities that they can do together. For example, you could organize monthly theme contests where people share their best profile picture, the funniest meme or photo, or the quote of the month.

Also Read: How Custom Microsoft Teams Apps Boost Your Business Productivity

Microsoft Teams - Collaboration at Its Best

Microsoft Teams is a powerful collaboration platform that integrates a broad range of apps. It brings together persistent chat, files and video conferencing in one unified space to optimise organisation and collaboration across your business.

Designed for teamwork, Teams brings everyone in the group together through voice and video meetings with up to 300 attendees. You can schedule meetings with a shared calendar or private ones with only you. You can also connect with other team members by inviting them into your meetings, even if they're in a different location.

With Teams, you can quickly share files from within your team to other users or teams, or to the entire community. Files can be synced to your device or on-hover via the Explorer-view experience, as well as viewed with rich previews and metadata.

You can even bookmark messages and attachments that contain important data to keep them easy to find in future. This is a great feature for keeping information organised and helps you avoid wasting time trying to search through large amounts of content.

Another useful feature is that you can easily invite non-business users into your Teams channels with their personal email account. This is ideal for teams that are working with vendors or other third parties who have their own email accounts.

Microsoft is introducing a number of new features to help teams stay productive. Among these is a new Power BI tab that gives every member of a channel or chat access to the data they need for their work. This is a huge boost for any team that uses reports and needs to be able to find the right data at the right time.

MS Teams Video Conferencing Platform

The MS Teams video conferencing platform provides an excellent way for remote and mobile workers to connect with colleagues, share ideas, and brainstorm. It also helps employees work collaboratively on documents and other files in real-time.

MS Teams offers the most comprehensive set of video and audio conferencing features of any collaborative platform available. In addition, it integrates a broad range of chat and collaboration tools, making it the perfect choice for organizations looking to move their communications from email to the cloud.

Managing meetings on Microsoft Teams is easy and intuitive. Organizers can schedule meetings for future dates or start them on demand.

To join a meeting, participants can receive an invitation in a variety of ways, such as in a calendar invite or email, or from a link within a text message or chat app. They can then click on the link to join the meeting from their computer or the Teams app for Android and iPhone users.

In addition, users can start a call directly from an existing conversation or by selecting the team and channel in which they want to start a video call. During the call, participants can view each other's screens and change them if given permission.

During the meeting, speakers can use Speaker Coach to practice their presentations so they don't forget key points or mispronounce words. It will help them to pace their presentation, keep a clear head, and avoid filler words. Eventually, Microsoft plans to implement Speaker Coach in Teams meetings as well.

MS Teams Communication and Keyboard Shortcuts

Microsoft Teams is a powerful collaboration tool that offers chat, audio and video calls, file sharing, and a workspace that puts apps and information where you’ll be communicating about work. It’s also a hub for delivering business process automation and managing workflows.

Team Communication

Among the most popular features of MS Teams is its chat, which is a fast and simple way to communicate with team members. Its search function is also useful, and the ability to save messages is another great timesaving feature.

Channels

Users can create channels within teams, which are topics of conversation that can be accessed by any member of that team. This helps keep chats and files organized and easily searched, which can help you get the most out of Microsoft Teams.

Private channels

Using a private channel in Teams is especially helpful if you have sensitive conversations that you don’t want everyone to see. You can make it private by clicking on the three-dot icon next to a team and selecting Private.

Urgent messaging

This is a very useful feature for quick responses to urgent requests from your colleagues. In addition, it can also notify other team members who are reading the message every two minutes for 20 minutes - so they'll be reminded to read it immediately.

Keyboard Shortcuts

If you're a busy person, keyboard shortcuts can be a lifesaver for you. These shortcuts will help you quickly navigate to various destinations, access needed content, and change your current status.

MS Teams Workflow

The team behind MS Teams has done a great job of developing an easy-to-use and powerful tool that helps businesses get work done. It’s a great way to connect everyone in the organization and help users collaborate and communicate seamlessly.

Teams is a central workspace for collaboration and communication that integrates with your other apps, including Outlook, Trello, Planner, GitHub, and many more. It’s also a place to store documents and share them with your teammates in an organized fashion.

Channels are a key feature of Microsoft Teams, allowing groups to create workspaces or channels dedicated to specific projects and goals. Inside a channel you can access tabs (document and app sharing), posts, and a wiki to help people stay on top of their tasks and goals.

A chat function is a must for any messaging platform, providing users with rich text, audio, and video chat capabilities, as well as file sharing. It can be used within a channel or between teams, groups, and individuals.

AttendanceBot is a simple and easy-to-use tool that helps managers monitor their team members’ shifts, absences, and vacation time in Microsoft Teams. With this feature, workers can easily track their schedules and make decisions that are in the best interest of their team.

Power Automate lets you automate processes from within Microsoft Teams with pre-built workflow templates. Use these flow templates to streamline high-volume tasks such as welcoming new employees, forwarding emails to a particular channel, adding or sharing files from a specific address to a folder, scheduling replies, and more.

MS Teams - Tools for Effective Team Management

Team management is a complex process that involves many different aspects. MS Teams offers a comprehensive set of tools to help you manage your team effectively. It also provides access to other Office 365 apps such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Channels in MS Teams: Chat channels give teams a space for discussion about specific topics. Members can @mention people, add files, and even create scheduled meetings in these channels.

One-on-one chat: In addition to channels, Microsoft Teams also has a one-on-one chat feature that allows you to have a private conversation with a single member of your team. This is a great way to ask quick questions, re-connect with someone who’s missed a call, or just get caught up on things outside of work.

Files in Teams: Use the Files tab to store documents that team members frequently access. These can be anything from a client’s budget to a technical report. You can also use the Wiki tab to add FAQs, guidelines, and best practices.

Calendar in Microsoft Teams: This is a powerful feature that enables you to easily schedule meetings with your team. It automatically posts a notification to the channel’s activity feed and enables all members of the channel, except external guests, to view any upcoming events.

Teams is a popular workplace tool that provides access to the latest versions of Office 365 apps and makes it easy to communicate with team members. The platform offers messaging, video conferencing, and co-authoring.

MS Teams Virtual Meetings

Video conferences are a big part of meetings with Microsoft Teams. They're simple to use, let you see people from anywhere in the world, and they're available on any device.

Keeping your team connected to one another has never been easier! MS Teams lets you set up and manage virtual rooms for any kind of meeting, including one-on-one chats, breakout rooms and ad hoc meetings.

Breakout rooms allow you to split a meeting into smaller groups for discussions or focus group brainstorming. They also let you create spaces where users can connect on a more personal level and get to know each other better.

The whiteboard is a great way for participants to draw on the screen in a meeting. It's available for anyone in a channel and can be used to sketch ideas, or make graphs.

Recordings are a powerful way to share company announcements and training materials with your team members. They're easy to edit and can be shared within minutes.

Noise is a huge distraction during online meetings, so you need to make sure it's not disrupting the conversation. Fortunately, Microsoft Teams has a mute feature that's available for every attendee in a large meeting to help you keep things quiet.

Audio conferencing is also a great option for remote workers who might not be able to access their computer at the office. With Teams' dial-in capabilities, people with unstable internet connections can join meetings and get their voice in the mix without having to be near a PC or laptop.

MS Teams Offers a Wide Range of Business Tools

Whether you’re looking to replace an old collaboration platform, or you’re looking for an essential new work tool for your organization, MS Teams offers a wide range of business tools that can help streamline communications and increase efficiency. Powered by Office 365, Microsoft Teams integrates with all of the features you need to work more efficiently.

Team Chat & Files

Teams allows users to hold dynamic meetings, presentations and work sessions that let them share files and work on them at the same time. This makes it easier for teams to communicate and collaborate on projects without losing information. You can add colored flags to files to prevent overlap and ensure that work isn’t missed or lost.

Bots

These bots are empowered with Artificial Intelligence and have their own knowledge banks that can help you complete a variety of tasks in a more efficient way. They can answer frequently asked questions about Teams, assist with voting/polling in Teams, and generate scheduled reports from a variety of platforms that are both internal and external.

Approvals

As an integral part of Teams, approvals provide a simple, secure way to send a request for approval via a chat or channel conversation. From client agreements to expense reports, you can now send a new item for approval from within your Teams channels.

Wiki – A Team Knowledge Base

If you’re looking for a way to share information with your team that isn’t already in your email inbox, look no further than Teams’ new Wiki app. Like Wikipedia, this app lets you create a repository of specific project information, so your team can easily find the answers they need to solve their problems or help others.

MS Teams Project Management Features

MS Teams is a highly versatile platform for collaboration, with a range of powerful capabilities that make it an excellent choice for a project manager. These include real-time chat, a powerful voice and video call system, powerful document and task management, effective communication tools and integrations with Microsoft 365 apps.

The simplest way to use Microsoft Teams for project management is to create a team. This creates a single workspace where all your project team members can communicate and work together, making it easy to keep everyone in the loop without having to leave Teams.

You can create a variety of channels within your team, from a shared channel that you can invite other project members to communicate with, to a private one that can only be accessible to selected users and contains sensitive information. Having these types of channels can help you to organize your project team more effectively, for example, by creating a Steering Committee channel where you can bring all the stakeholders in a particular project to discuss strategy and progress, as well as a budget channel that is accessible only to specific users that is used for storing and discussing sensitive information.

All of this is possible in Microsoft Teams because it seamlessly integrates with SharePoint and keeps all of your team's important documents in one place, which is extremely useful for project management. You can also connect third-party cloud storage providers to ensure all relevant files are stored in a secure location and can be accessed easily, even from outside of Teams.